Making DND softkey of SPA9xx work with Asterisk to create appropriate hint

i am wondering if there is a way to have the DND softkey enabled but instead of the phone handling DND send the desired feature code to the asterisk server to be able to see the DND status on a BLF of a SPA962 for example ? if i enable DND on the phone it does not communicate the DND status to the asterisk server and asterisk can not create the appropriate 'hint' to make the BLF show busy for that particular extension.

if it does not work with any of the SPA9xx is there a way with the SPA5xx series phones ?

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If you do a search on the Cisco support community you'll notice that this has been repeatedly requested over a number of years. Unfortunately I've not seen any interest from Cisco to implement this feature.

Have seen all the questions with regard to the way SPA9xx and SPA5xx deal with vertical feature codes.

For DND and CF it would not be very difficult to use the original DND (that has the toggle option built-in), but sending a star code to the pbx instead of activating dnd locally.

the current local dnd has a lot of dissadvantages as many mention: calls are set up to the phone before the pbx finds out the phone is not available, Operator Panels (FOP) that are not aware of the DND status etc etc.

The workaround with adding a softkey that activates a PSK to notify the PBX has the disadvantage that there is no way to toggle the softkey or give a different indication.

Having checked the firmware (and release notes) of all versions in 2012 up 'till now I haven't seen anything that looks like a feature we could use to toggle DND (and other functions) on the PBX side instead of on the phone only. Did I miss something?

While this option appears to be a temporary fix, I am curious if there has been any progress made at all with the development of the DND key being able to send a soft command to alert asterisk that it is in DND mode.Any information would be

This is what I did indeed: make PSKs. The problem with those is that it is unclear to the user if the phone is in DND state or not. So with this solution the feature request would be to make a PSK 'toggleable'.

I have disabled DND on all my phones, becuase our users forget that it is turned on as it is not obvious that DND is on. Some employees purposly turn it on and act stupid becuase it was not obvious. Yes it displays "Do Not Disturb" on the screen, but when the backlight is off, you don't notice it unless you are looking for it

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The phone should have an option to flash lights or turn them all red or a different color to scream "DND is on!!!"

Without loud and clear DND notification, DND is useless to me. I have the users unplug thier phones, but that creates another set of issues. For the users that need DND, i'm going to have to investigate to see if other brands of phones offer a loud & clear DND notification.

Firstly let me say thanks to Cisco for recognising the customer feedback and agreeing to work on it.

I have two concerns:

1. The proposal is to use a PSK to perform this function. I am puzzled by this since there is already a DND key available. Why duplicate it? Surely it would be more sensible to use the existing DND to (optionally) send the feature code to the server to advise DND on or off. That way if a user did nothing there would be no change. However if the user allocated a feature code on and feature code off in the phone configuration then when the DND button was toggled it would also send the feature code to the server. Indeed I would argue this should also be made available for the CFWD options.

2. The proposal does not indicate that there is a way to update the phone remotely. For example if the DND is set server side through some other mechanism, there should be a way to update the phone so the user can see that DND is set. This could be done through an OPTIONS message using a similar method to a MWI. This should also apply to CFWD.

1) It would make sense to update the existing DND key to be in sync with the iPBX, but the advantage of a generic 'toggable' PSK is that it can be used for other purposes like toggling day/night, or logging into queues

2) that would be a great addition indeed, although I wouldn't know how this could be done based on feature codes transported by SIP. maybe SIP option...

* In Service Annc Extension Code add DDT:x;DDT:y where x and y are the suffixes appended to the prefix you dial to enable and disable DND on the server, IE use something like 9998 for the prefix and 1 and 2 for the suffix, so 99981 enables DND and 99982 disables DND.

3) Now for some reason Cisco don't send these codes when you press the generic dnd/-dnd Softkeys so you need to remove these and program your own to replace them. Luckily as of firmwere 7.5.3 cisco support dual states on psk's so you can have a + and - version of the same key:

4) Phone tab.

Programable softkeys enable = yes

PSK 1: fnc=sd;ext=*09;nme=DND;ext2=*10; nme2=-DND

(note the *09 and *10 are from the regional tab on the DND Act and DND Deact code)

Under the Idle key list find the dnd|8 and replace it with psk1|8 to get rid of the generic internal dnd softkey.

save and reboot.

Now you still have DND on your idle soft keys, press it, your phone should both set DND, change the soft key to "-DND" and add "Do Not Disturb" across the screen panel. Most importantly the phone will now auto dial 99981@$proxy and the switch now knows the DND state. Press the -DND softkey and the phone will disable DND locally and also dial the switch telling it dnd is now off.

I'm 99% this is what people have been asking for? Essentially local dnd support with server notification not having to dial the crazy *codes to make it all work?